NOVEL | 2015 | 200 pages

Conjunto vacío tells the story of Verónica, the daughter of Argentine expats who live in Mexico City. Verónica must return to her mother's old apartment, the place where she lived before she suddenly disappeared a few years ago. It's also a story of love and loss in which a breakup results in a journey to uncover family roots.

Whenever words aren't enough, they stutter, the decompose and only drawings, abstractions and sketches will do. This novel invents its own language. From the written word to visual representations, the author builds a story filled with holes that open up inside other holes. Written in a lucid and melancholy tone, Conjunto vacío is a brilliant and honest début that invites the reader into a unique fictional universe that confirms Gerber is one of the most interesting voices in contemporary Mexican literature.

Verónica Gerber writes with a bright intimacy; her novel is witty, brilliant, moving and deeply original. Reeding it made me feel that the world had been mended.

— Francisco Goldman

If something illuminates the writing of Gerber (Mexico City, 1981), it is the transparency, the gracefulness, the confidence, she is an authentic and perhaps unintentional Stendhalian who, in Conjunto vacío tells, in both an unusual and familiar way, a lapse in the history of her generation, the one of the first South Americans born in Mexico—the place where their parents took refuge while the atrocious dictatorships reigned in the South. By force, this literature will be very different from that of their parents.

— Christopher Domínguez, El Universal

For the young writer and visual artist Verónica Gerber, the city, the world, literature and above all, exile, constitute an empty set, a uninhabited nest from which a mother escapes and in whose interior a bunker is built to have a secure life… When words become insufficient they all that is left are sketches, abstractions, diagrams. This novel does not hesitate to invent its own language: a language formed with graphics, lines and empty spaces. From writing to visual representations, the author builds a story of holes that appear inside other holes.

— Mónica Maristáin, Sin Embargo

It is clear that Conjunto vacío is an experiment that transcends mere narrative aesthetics in order to go deep into what is intrinsic to human beings, be it the question of identity, space, or the absence or constant accumulation of emptiness.

— Federico González, Vértigo Político

The reader becomes a detective and rummages in the story to find out its secrets. This is the bet that the author Verónica Gerber (Ciudad de México, 1981) imprinted to her novel Conjunto vacío.

— Juan Carlos Talavera, Excelsior

In an intimate, precise and profound prose, that just occasionally observes the world “from above” according to the set theory, [Verónica Gerber] attempts to better narrate what has always resisted itself to the stubborn linearity of writing: the wounds of exile, the disappearances, the disappointments of love… A solid and luminous first novel that renews, like few others, the landscape of young Latin American authors. Gerber is a writer who draws and who has managed to slip some “true icons” into the ranks of these lines of little black signs printed on pages that we have all agreed to call literature.

Empty Set is a story about trying to make sense of the recurrence of loss through logic. Verónica Gerber Bicecci is a visual artist from Mexico City who uses charts and drawings throughout her prose. “There are things, I’m sure,” she writes, “that can’t be told in words.” Empty Set is a visceral and lucid story and also an art object. Like other work translated by Christina MacSweeney—from writers like Valeria Luiselli, Elvira Navarro, and Julián Herbert—it’s radical and compulsively readable.

— Nathan Scott McNamara, Lit Hub

A smart story of love and loss with a clever mix of narrative techniques, Empty Set may be an antidote to the current climate of despair.